The first banter of this 2nd year of EVE Blog Banters comes to us from Zargyl from A Sebiestor Scholar, who asked the following: On the EVE Fanfest 2009 page are pictures of prizes for the Silent Auction that was held during the event. One of these photos was entitled “Design your own EVE mission”. My question now would be what kind of mission would you write if you got that prize? What would the mission be about? Would it be one using the new system of epic mission arks? What would be the story told by it? Feel free to expand upon his questions and put together your very own mission!
(Warning! Post was written at 0320 local time! Brace for possible babbling and insanity!)
Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I'll explain why.
My first MMO wasn't World of Warcraft, a fact that I suspect is rather dissimilar to most folks. My first MMO was City of Heroes, and on a friend's recommendation I joined the unofficial RP server, and the only times I haven't been playing the game were when my computer was broken, or I was deployed by the military. And one of the things I love best about City of Heroes is their mission arc system.
"But EVE has epic arcs!" That's not what I'm talking about. Every contact you are introduced to you has an arc of missions for you, that suck you into the universe of Paragon City and make you actually feel a little bit more like you really are a superhero, dealing with threats the regular cops can't handle. They're all a bit like a trade paperback of a comic book, now that I think about it. And it's a system I thoroughly enjoy, and one I'd love to see the CCP developers work a little more into. I don't just want more missions. I want arcs. I want to feel like my capsuleer is actually having an impact in the New Eden cluster instead of going out and killing more pirates, or carrying and fetching crap from station to station.
Yes, I know EVE is - by design - PVP-centric. I fully admit that, and I'll be honest, there are times when I've thought about starting a second character and getting them involved in EVE University, and learn from them a bit more about this PVP thing. (Simpler, I think, would be to just get someone in my corp to talk me through the jump clone process and join up with them in 0.0 space... I fly battleships, so learning by doing wouldn't be too expensive...) But to me, if I'm going to do PVE, then dagnabbit, I want story. I want immersion. I want to feel like I'm making a difference. That's what EVE's PVE experience is missing. Not a bigger variety of missions. Not more agents. Not even more epic arcs. I want to see - or at least read about in the post-mission briefing! - the consequences of my actions. The folks involved in wars out in 0.0 get to see that, on the EVE site, in E-ON, or on the forums, but for the pod pilot out just trying to fight off NPC pirates? All you get is coming back to a station, a list of repairs, pick up more ammo, and then get a bare "thanks" from your mission agent.
List of Participants:
- CrazyKinux's Musing - Your Mission, should you decide to accept it...
- Zen and the Art of Internet Spaceship Maintenance - First Blood
- The Elitist - Guristas Invasion
- The Wandering Druid of Tranquility - ...It's another episode of Design Star: EVE Style...
- Level Cap -Epic Battles
- Roc's Ramblings - The Cave of Time
- Aether - Teach a man to fish...
- Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah - Mission: Tangled Webs
- Adventures in Mission Running - I can haz spaceship?
- Nuke Thoughts - EVE Blog Banter 13
- Diary of a Pod Pilot - Distressing The Damsel
- Guns Ablaze - Dynamic Missions
- Achernar - Confidential Report
- Escoce - EVE Trader - Missions with player adversaries
- Hands Off, My Loot! - Blog Banter #13, no witty title
- Inanity and Doom - A question of impact
- Cle Demaari: Citizen in EVE - See the Universe
- A Starry Eyed Pod-Pusher - Wormhole Extreme!
- Mike Azariah - Missioneer, not mouseketeer
